Contemporary Women Writers

"Every word a woman writes changes the story of the world, revises the official version," is this what sets contemporary women writers apart? How can we understand the relation between the radically unprecedented material such writers explore and 'the official version'? What do we find compelling in their challenging of structure, style, chronology, character? Our reading- and writing-intensive seminar will dig into the ways women writers confront, appropriate, subvert, or re-imagine convention, investigating, for example, current debate about the value of 'dislikable' or 'angry' women characters and their impact on readers. While pursuing such issues, you'll write a variety of both essayistic and fictional responses, each of which is designed to complicate and enlarge your creative and critical responsiveness and to spark ideas for your final project. By affirming risk-taking and originality throughout our quarter, seminar conversation will support gains in your close-reading practice and in articulating your views, including respectful dissent, in lively discourse - in short, skills highly useful in a writer's existence. Our texts will come from various genres, including short stories, novels, essays, blog posts, reviews, memoir.